Virtualization capabilities on low power SBCs

[dtklein]

Firstly, thank you for your videos and the knowledge and experience you impart. I just discovered your work and have learned a good deal so far.

I will probably need to return to an in house laboratory (VMs and containers inside my Mac Airbook or in AWS won’t cut it), but do not want the noise and power-draw of a couple of traditional rack mounted servers. If suitable, it seems like these small SBCs (or SoC/SoM in a carrier board) might do the trick, for a lower price than a couple of MAC Minis or Micro PCs.

Would the various x86/x64 SBCs support a virtualization supervisor (such as ESX, HyperV, XenServer/KVM) with a couple of long-running workloads each (AD Domain Server; AD Federation Service or a similar OAuth/OpenID Connect IdP; K3s running a couple of smaller Python and dotNet codes; Splunk, ELK, or similar)? The Latte Panda SoM that you discussed in https://youtu.be/GKGtRrElu30?si=kFIakLL7HtAkRQcg sounds like it would be a good alternative to a server for lightweight workloads.

I guess more direct questions:

• Do the x86/x64 SBCs support virtualization in the hardware?
• Do the x86/x64 SBCs parallelize processing nicely (for example, multiprocessing on multi core engines)?
• Do the x86/x64 SBCs have suitably fast access to RAM, so each virtual guest thinks it’s on a computer directly?
• Are there gotchas you’ve seen or heard about, using these small systems to run a virtualized environment, with multiple workloads?

Thanks in advance,

-dtklein